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Video: S. Korea: Pyongyang readying for nuke test

Transcript of: S. Korea: Pyongyang readying for nuke test

NATALIE MORALES, anchor:And we begin in
North Korea
where this morning
South Korean intelligence
officials say
Pyongyang
may be preparing for a third nuclear test. This as the country gets ready for a
rocket launch
that has the US concerned.
NBC
's chief foreign correspondent,
Richard Engel
, is in
Pyongyang
with the latest.
Richard
, good morning.

RICHARD ENGEL reporting:Good morning,
Natalie
. Today,
North Korea
began what will be two weeks of official celebrations here. It's all designed to reinforce the transition of power from the late
Kim Jong Il
to his son
Kim Jong Un
. In one of
Pyongyang
's main squares today, a sea of people expressed joy for their great leader and eternal president and praise for his descendants.

Unidentified Man #1:

ENGEL:What stirred their excitement was this: a giant mural unveiled today of the late
Kim Jong Il
. And when the assembly was over, the thousands just walked away, orderly, no trash left behind. Uniformed schoolchildren, families and workers simply left. In a nearby park, accompanied by a government minder,
Kim Wen Gyong
told us everyone supports the state. You think it's a good system...

Ms. KIM WEN GYONG:Hm.

ENGEL:...for the people of
North Korea
.

Ms. KIM:Hm, hm, yeah. Everybody, they understand and they uphold the line of the -- our party.

ENGEL:This weekend, journalists were taken by train to a military base to see this.
North Korea
says it's an observation satellite it will soon launch into orbit. Officials say it will circle the
Earth
for two years. Controversially, it will be blast off by a hundred-foot rocket.
North Korea
calls this the
Unha-3
. It is a powerful three-stage rocket, liquid-fueled as far as we know, with enough lifting force to carry a thousand-pound payload. US officials worry that it could easily be converted into an
intercontinental ballistic missile
, a rocket that could reach the
continental United States
. The site's director says the
United States
has nothing to fear.

Unidentified Man #2:No, it cannot be used for military use.

ENGEL:Back on the train
,
NBC
space analyst
Jim Oberg
gave us his assessment.

ENGEL:If successful,
North Korea
says the satellite will monitor the weather and track forest fires, but it could also advance this nation's long-range rocket capability. Despite international condemnation,
North Korea
says it will go ahead with its satellite launch sometime between the 12th and the 16th of this month.

Natalie:Richard Engel
with some fascinating reporting there inside in
Pyongyang
. Thanks so much.

TONGCHANG-RI, North Korea — A central part of our preparation to visit North Korea's Sohae Satellite Station involved studying satellite imagery of the facilities there — and guessing exactly what they were showing. Establishing "ground truth" for analysis performed using photographs taken hundreds of miles overhead is always important, especially in assessing how much to trust similar analyses of other sites that have never actually been seen up close.

So imagine my delight on Sunday as our special train slowly pulled up to the northern boundary of the site, to see that the main gate and guard house were exactly where the photographs indicated they would be. Even the prediction about road surface was confirmed — a hard dirt surface outside the base became a paved road once the gate had been passed.

Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: "Astronaut Abby" is at the controls of a social-media machine that is launching the 15-year-old from Minnesota to Kazakhstan this month for the liftoff of the International Space Station's next crew.

Even more satisfying was an eyeball examination of an odd building on the east side of the road. It had been seen in satellite images to have had its roof rushed to completion in the last few weeks. And there it was, its roof finally complete. But as we rode past, we could see in the front windows and right out the back ones, showing that its interior remained to be completed.

The 13-car luxury train pulled right up where we expected, at a concrete unloading apron attached by short road to the vehicle assembly building. After an energetic but brief security search at the edge of the unloading zone, our group straggled out to the main north-south thoroughfare easily visible in the space images, then turned south and quickly made a right turn into the assembly building parking lot.

There at the gate I knew that the most delicious "known unknown" of the base layout would be awaiting me. Only days before our visit, the color of the parking lot's concrete had suddenly changed from a dull gray to a strange dark green. Was it deliberate camouflage, to reduce the building’s visibility from space — or something entirely innocent?

The cause of the change was obvious as soon as I passed the gate. The concrete had been covered over by a tarlike layer that looked straight black, not green-tinged at all. It was not just a thin paint layer, but was about an eighth of an inch thick. But as for why it had been applied — that question remained unanswered.

Getting our bearings
The main item of exhibition inside the hall was the actual satellite, but what struck my eye immediately upon entering was something entirely unexpected — a floor-to-ceiling mural with a stylized map of the entire base.

James Oberg / msnbc.com

A map displayed at North Korea's Sohae Satellite Station shows the layout of the launch center's facilities.

Sadly, it was labeled only in Korean. But our guide explained most of the facilities during a brief introduction, and our interpreter helped with the rest. During the few hours that followed, we visited or passed near most of the facilities, confirming their functions.

The launch pad was easy to identify, as was the base administration building and the vehicle assembly building. But the base’s other main building had been wrongly identified, seriously so.

Called a "high bay processing facility" in most Western interpretations, the building was due east of the assembly hall and was the only other facility besides the hall that had a security fence around it. It also had seen its cement forecourt suddenly change color a few days before we got there, the only other building to undergo that cosmetic retouching. Meanwhile, another facility atop a hill to the west of the launch pad was called the launch control center.

What we found out was that the so-called "control center" on the hill was just an observation point, probably for VIPs — and the real Launch Control Center was in the important fenced building mislabeled as the high-bay facility. Our earlier impression would have led to a serious misunderstanding of the function of the base.

This isn’t just an issue for the North Korean rocket base. Interpretation of satellite images of other inaccessible facilities — think Iran, for example — may be critical to future military options and planning, and errors can have profound costs.

Recognizing the clues
Visiting a previously closed site opens up the opportunity for stumbling across unexpected clues to lingering mysteries, clues that even top-security censors fail to recognize and protect. Noticing them takes a trained alertness and awareness of their significance — something I like to think I’ve developed from long experience at sleuthing out space secrets.

One such clue was on display inside the launch control center.

AP / Kyodo News

Several screens are displayed at the front of the control center inside the Sohae Satellite Station. The chart with altitude and range figures is at upper left.

A lingering mystery of the upcoming launch is the design of the ascent profile to put the satellite in its planned 312-mile-high (500-kilometer-high) orbit. The most efficient path is to get quickly into a low but fast orbit, coast higher for about half an hour, and then fire a rocket again. But this is a sophisticated maneuver, probably beyond the prowess of a fledgling space player.

The other approach is to "loft" the rocket to get to the high altitude quickly. This is wasteful of fuel, and it makes the trajectory look awfully similar to a long-range surface-to-surface missile flight plan. Those are good reasons to try to avoid it.

Which course will the North Koreans choose?. There was a chart on the front screen of the control center for displaying the rocket’s climb into space, with altitude plotted against range from the launch pad. For security purposes, that screen showed no flight path, not even a sample one. But what it did show was all we needed to know.

The chart listed the range of values on the vertical and horizontal scales. For range from launch there were marks every 500 kilometers, out to 3,000. And for altitude, there were marks every 200 kilometers, up to 800. And that clue told the tale. If you're plotting a flight path up to or even a little above 500 kilometers during the initial launch period — as the scale of this chart indicated — you will be using an inefficient and somewhat weapons-like ‘lofted’ path.

There are more clues still to be tracked down, and if they check out, we'll have a much better understanding of North Korea's mysterious space shot.

NBC News space analyst James Oberg spent 22 years at NASA's Johnson Space Center as a Mission Control operator and an orbital designer. He is the author of several books on space history and space policy, including "Star-Crossed Orbits: Inside the U.S.-Russian Space Alliance."

Southern stargazing

Stars, galaxies and nebulas dot the skies over the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Paranal Observatory in Chile, in a picture released on Jan. 7. This image also shows three of the four movable units that feed light into the Very Large Telescope Interferometer, the world's most advanced optical instrument. Combining to form one larger telescope, they are greater than the sum of their parts: They reveal details that would otherwise be visible only through a telescope as large as the distance between them.
(Y. Beletsky / ESO)
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A balloon's view

Cameras captured the Grandville High School RoboDawgs' balloon floating through Earth's upper atmosphere during its ascent on Dec. 28, 2013. The Grandville RoboDawgs’ first winter balloon launch reached an estimated altitude of 130,000 feet, or about 25 miles, according to coaches Mike Evele and Doug Hepfer. It skyrocketed past the team’s previous 100,000-feet record set in June. The RoboDawgs started with just one robotics team in 1998, but they've grown to support more than 30 teams at public schools in Grandville, Mich.
(Kyle Moroney / AP)
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Spacemen at work

Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov, right, and Sergey Ryazanskiy perform maintenance on the International Space Station on Jan. 27. During the six-hour, eight-minute spacewalk, Kotov and Ryazanskiy completed the installation of a pair of high-fidelity cameras that experienced connectivity issues during a Dec. 27 spacewalk. The cosmonauts also retrieved scientific gear outside the station's Russian segment.
(NASA)
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Special delivery

The International Space Station's Canadian-built robotic arm moves toward Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Cygnus autonomous cargo craft as it approaches the station for a Jan. 12 delivery. The mountains below are the southwestern Alps.
(NASA)
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Accidental art

A piece of art? A time-lapse photo? A flickering light show? At first glance, this image looks nothing like the images we're used to seeing from the Hubble Space Telescope. But it's a genuine Hubble frame that was released on Jan. 27. Hubble's team suspects that the telescope's Fine Guidance System locked onto a bad guide star, potentially a double star or binary. This caused an error in the tracking system, resulting in a remarkable picture of brightly colored stellar streaks. The prominent red streaks are from stars in the globular cluster NGC 288.
(NASA / ESA)
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Supersonic test flight

A camera looking back over Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo's fuselage shows the rocket burn with a Mojave Desert vista in the background during a test flight of the rocket plane on Jan. 10. Cameras were mounted on the exterior of SpaceShipTwo as well as its carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo, to monitor the rocket engine's performance. The test was aimed at setting the stage for honest-to-goodness flights into outer space later this year, and eventual commercial space tours.

Red lagoon

The VLT Survey Telescope at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile captured this richly detailed new image of the Lagoon Nebula, released on Jan. 22. This giant cloud of gas and dust is creating intensely bright young stars, and is home to young stellar clusters. This image is a tiny part of just one of 11 public surveys of the sky now in progress using ESO telescopes.
(ESO/VPHAS team)
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Fire on the mountain

This image provided by NASA shows a satellite view of smoke from the Colby Fire, taken by the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer aboard NASA's Terra spacecraft as it passed over Southern California on Jan. 16. The fire burned more than 1,863 acres and forced the evacuation of 3,700 people.
(NASA via AP)
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Where stars are born

An image captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Orion Nebula, an immense stellar nursery some 1,500 light-years away. This false-color infrared view, released on Jan. 15, spans about 40 light-years across the region. The brightest portion of the nebula is centered on Orion's young, massive, hot stars, known as the Trapezium Cluster. But Spitzer also can detect stars still in the process of formation, seen here in red hues.
(NASA / JPL-Caltech)
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A long, long time ago...

This long-exposure picture from the Hubble Space Telescope, released Jan. 8, is the deepest image ever made of any cluster of galaxies. The cluster known as Abell 2744 appears in the foreground. It contains several hundred galaxies as they looked 3.5 billion years ago. Abell 2744 acts as a gravitational lens to warp space, brightening and magnifying images of nearly 3,000 distant background galaxies. The more distant galaxies appear as they did more than 12 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang.
(NASA / NASA via AFP - Getty Images)
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Frosty halo

Sun dogs are bright spots that appear in the sky around the sun when light is refracted through ice crystals in the atmosphere. These sun dogs appeared on Jan. 5 amid brutally cold temperatures along Highway 83, north of Bismarck, N.D. The temperature was about 22 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, with a 50-below-zero wind chill.